What do other folks say about Tracker?

“I leave Tracker open all day. I use it for documenting, estimating and prioritizing things that need to be done. It’s a relief to open Tracker at the start of the day and focus on the next most important task. It keeps me from getting distracted and having too many things going at the same time. It also serves as documentation of what I’ve completed in the past—to show that I’m making good use of my time.”

What do you think about Tracker?

Haven’t heard about Pivotal Tracker before, and I know a lot of PM tools. They should probably provide a demo account in case someone wants to take a look (a lot of people don’t want to give their information before trying something out).

OK, sure, if I bin the laptop, and never do any work except when sitting in the office or at home. Never do any work on a trip, on a plane, in a hotel, in a cafe, on a train.

Unfortunately, that makes this a “fail” for me, and I suspect a lot of other people. Nice idea, but until internet becomes fully ubiquitous, and AT&T etc stop charging insanely high prices for roaming data, I cannot afford to stop working each time I leave the house :(.

One day, I hope someone will make a free simple library that converts any DB-based web-app into a replicating, distributed, DB-based web-app. And then all these “net connection required” webapps can catch up to software development circa 1995, and start working from *anywhere*. 🙂

I like on that tool:
– easy usage
– fast
– funny
– get nearly 50% more work done since I use it
– it makes you think how effective your work was and how much effective work you’ve done the last days and weeks

I don’t like on that tool:
– online only
– someone else has my PM in his DB without any encription
– with a little effort I can do 95% of that with trac too and trac does not have the same contras

I think I will use it for not critical data and try to work out how I can get trac to do the same for me.

I’ve used Pivotal Tracker before. It’s nothing like an iPod. PT does have lots of cool features, but it was slow and had so much javascript going on in the background that it crashed my browser half the time.

Interesting, I’ve not used PT. Will definitely try it out. But Deskaway (www.deskaway.com) is what I use currently. I work with various remote teams, people with multiple skill sets and varying complexities. With Deskaway, managing all these projects / accounts seems easy. Their UI is simple, user friendly – does not confuse you – I used basecamp and thought that it was rather complex and my challenge was to get all people I work with to use Basecamp… but with Deskaway, its intuitive nature made it rather easy for everyone to get onto this PM tool.

I started using Pivotal Tracker, and think it has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it is intuitive, has an easy interface, and is free. I certainly have not found another project management software out there for free!

On the minus side is that you can not set Precedents or Dependents. I planned to use PT for the launch of a website, and all of the technical and business areas around this launch. Without the use of precedents, how can my team know when a task needs to be taken care of (as it relates to the other tasks that the group must do)?

I’ve used Basecamp and several others, but nothing comes close to Pivot Tracker. Its amazing! We are only a two-man shop right now, but this app really helps with our dev productivity and organizes tasks and releases into manageable chunks.

Thanks, Nivi, for highlighting Pivotal Tracker. I have to admit that I did originally see this post about a year ago but didn’t have an immediate need for such a tool. I’ve just gone through their video tutorial and it seems rather good so far. Easy to use, has all of the core functionality one would expect from a lean-centric PM tool.

I would like to point out that I’ve also been using Assembla as they have integrated ticketing, SVN hosting, and a rather nifty SCRUM-based planning tool rolled into one solution. I can’t say I’ll be leaving Assembla (as their service is rather good), but I’m hoping Pivotal will fill in any gaps in our workflow.

Your post is 2 yrs old now, but the comment thread still shows activity so I thought I’d chime in 🙂

If you like PT, I think you’d find a lot of value in using Planio.com . It’s still in Beta but I think it delivers on very important features that Pivotal does not cover:
– Sorting and filtering of stories (see stories that matter to you and hide the ones that don’t)
– Progress indicators (know where you, your team and co-workers stand with respect to the schedule)
– Integrated feedback management (embed our feedback widget in your site and feedback is added to Planio automagically)
– Drag and drop file attachments in stories

You can even import a project from Pivotal Tracker, and can export your data any time…

Give it a try and let me know what you think! We’d love to build a tool that VH and its readership would find useful.

* manage website development projects with workers in different parts of the country.

* manage client orders for my retail/import online-only business where my staff work from different locations

* organise and manage my home improvement projects

* co-ordinate a team of 5 people migrating hundreds of pages of web content during a website replacement project

To Martin: read the docs on using the search box to work out how to filter, then save your searches. As for sorting, the order of stories is intentionally fixed and correlates to priority. Tracker will automatically indicate the dates by which your team’s work is expected to complete. The charts help visualise this too. I believe you can link Tracker to other systems in order to incorporate bug reports from elsewhere. But as for drag and drop file attachments.. no answer there.

The things I like most: FAST and EASY to use! Clone a list of stories, open as many stories simultaneously as you like, copy and paste info between them – no page refreshes, no endless clicking just to navigate (one screen, remember) and all users online around the world are updated in real-time each time a change is committed, with a friendly notice popping up at the top of the screen and the story being momentarily highlighted. Also, practically zero time to estimate a task and the thing works out your velocity like a breeze.

You can host Tracker yourself if you’ve got 50 users or more, which I don’t. I enquired with PT about data security, privacy, etc and was satisfied to go with them despite my data going out to a third party – I mean, who doesn’t use a webmail account of some sort at some point in time?